monitoring

UNCLASSIFIED
DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD | DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
systematically and “whole;” improved through technical tools that enable access, sensing, and
assessment; and continuously tested against evolving and adaptive proliferant strategies and
techniques.
To achieve these goals, a major diplomatic effort to build trust and confidence will be required.
Investments will also be needed to develop and field capabilities beyond the traditional
emphases in treaty‐monitoring technologies. Two key examples illustrate the point. First, the
powerful tactical ISR developed for Iraq and Afghanistan – for example, for suppressing the
improvised explosive device (IED) threat – should be adapted and extended for nuclear
monitoring, especially where access is limited or denied. Such capabilities could also be
negotiated for use in challenge inspections. Second, the “big data” technologies for extracting
meaning from vast quantities of data that are being developed commercially in the information
technology (IT) industry, and for other purposes in DoD and the IC, need to be extended and
applied to nuclear monitoring. 11
Nations seeking to proliferate and/or to evade the provisions of treaties (as well as non‐nation
state adversaries with nuclear ambitions) will be adaptive in hiding or obscuring what they are
doing. Staying ahead of their adaptation must be an integral and deliberate part of U.S. efforts
to develop and implement a comprehensive nuclear monitoring regime. A key element of
staying ahead is continuously challenging our own assumptions. The Task Force believes this
could best be accomplished through testing and experimentation in which monitoring
capabilities would be challenged by red‐teaming, with the red/blue interactions analyzed and
refereed by a “white team.” In this way, we can “try before we buy”, and account for others’
use of technology to thwart our own. 12
In summary, the challenges of controlling and stabilizing the nuclear future, and the difficulty of
monitoring global nuclear activities in that future, mean that the nation must plan for a long
period of building both the political and technical groundwork for the next major steps in
formal treaties or agreements, as well as for addressing proliferation more broadly where
cooperation is unlikely for the foreseeable future. To drive the point home, the Task Force
adopted the motto: “We can’t let our treaties get ahead of our monitoring and verification
headlights.”
11 These approaches are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, section 3.4, and Chapter 5.
12 The national testing capability is discussed in some detail in Chapter 6, sections 6.2 and 6.3.
DSB TASK FORCE REPORT Chapter 1: The Problem | 19
Nuclear Treaty Monitoring Verification Technologies
UNCLASSIFIED